Broadband data and video services, on which our society and economy have grown to depend, have heretofore generally not been readily available to users on board mobile platforms such as aircraft, ships, trains, automobiles, etc. While the technology exists to deliver such services to all forms of mobile platforms, past solutions have been generally quite expensive, low data rate and/or available to only very limited markets of government/military users and some high-end maritime markets (i.e., cruise ships).
One particular problem with establishing communication links between numbers of mobile platforms operating within a given coverage region, and a single base station, for example a ground-based radio frequency (RF) transceiver, is the difficulty in quickly establishing communications links with each of the mobile platforms. For example, with commercial air traffic dozens of aircraft may be moving into and out of a given coverage region throughout any given time period. In this situation, it is critical that each aircraft be able to quickly establish a communications link with the base station within the coverage region which it is traversing without interfering with communication links already established with the base station by other aircraft.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,975,616 discloses a batch round robin polling method for return link communications between a mobile platform and a base station. The entire disclosure of U.S. Pat. No. 6,975,616 is hereby incorporated by reference. Mobile platforms may be “off-the-air” because they only operate a few days a month, like a business jet, or because they only elect to buy services for a few hours a week, like a maritime platform, or because they have landed to unload and load passengers, like a commercial airplane. Batch round robin polling may not efficiently handle the subset of mobile platforms that are intentionally not communicating with a base station. One common denominator for this subset of mobile platforms is any individual mobile platform's need for service is temporally independent of any other mobile platform's need for service. This situation typically results in a very low probability that any two will want to establish communication service through the same coverage area at the exact same time. Batch round robin polling continues to cyclically offer dedicated return communications channels to these mobile platforms even though they are unlikely to use one.
Cycling though all mobile platforms in the pooling pool in a reasonable time cycle, nominally five minutes, requires ground receiver assets and consumes return link power spectral density (PSD), the resource that limits the net data rate achievable through a return link transponder when using small aperture antennas, with little likelihood that a mobile platform will use the offered return communications channel. This is an inefficient use of ground receivers and return link capacity.